Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, Bin Laden participated in the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union, and supported the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Opposed to American foreign policy in the Middle East, Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and advocated attacks targeting U.S. assets in various countries, and supervised the execution of the September 11 attacks inside the U.S. in 2001.

Born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family, he studied at Saudi and foreign universities until 1979, when he joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreign mujahideen into the war. As the Soviet war in Afghanistan came to an end, Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 to carry out worldwide jihad. In the Gulf War, Bin Laden's offer of support to Saudi Arabia against Iraq was rejected by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid.

Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991. He shifted his headquarters to Sudan until 1996, when he established a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban. Bin Laden declared two fatāwā in August 1996 and February 1998, declaring holy war against the U.S. After al-Qaeda's bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, which killed hundreds of civilians, he was indicted by a U.S. district court and listed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists and Most Wanted Fugitives lists. In October 1999, the United Nations designated al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization.

Bin Laden organized the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians. This resulted in the U.S. invading Afghanistan and launching the war on terror. Bin Laden became the subject of a nearly decade-long international manhunt led by the U.S. During this period, he hid in the mountains of Afghanistan and later escaped to neighboring Pakistan. On 2 May 2011, Bin Laden was killed by U.S. special operations forces at his compound in Abbottabad. His corpse was buried in the Arabian Sea and he was succeeded by his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on 16 June 2011. During his lifetime, Bin Laden became a symbol of terrorism and was reviled in the United States and elsewhere as a mass murderer due to his orchestration of numerous attacks and bombings.